A worrying problem has arisen. Your first thoughts may be of war, or of crisis, economical or humanitarian. No. Having perused the Twitter account of President Donald Trump, I know this severe case is a matter for the US Government.

As of its reopening following closures for remodelling over the Christmas period, my local Tesco has stopped selling the vastly superior cookies and cream flavoured KitKats in favour of the original version.

[Nov 16th Edit: This has been in my drafts for a while. You may or may not already agree that the opening statement has happened. I repeat the it with the emphasis on unequivocal proof, e.g. love confessions, public admissions of a relationship, and/or explicit on screen kisses.]

I’m going to start by making a bold claim: that the sports-genre anime Yuri!!! on Ice will feature a canon (textual) same-sex couple. I would bet money on it.

Some of the lucky few who follow me everywhere may have noticed my fledgling journey into minimalism. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, this isn’t about owning only two pieces of underwear or tearing up my carpet and wallpaper – it was more that something has to give when you end up in the mindset that “my life needs to be simpler. stat!”

So far, it’s working well for me. I’ve made a couple of shortposts on my studyblr (a tumblr blog for your studies, as the name suggests) about it, but on here I wanted to write a slightly longer piece in response to the most amazing thing I’ve read recently:

Those big creative goals that I need to get out before they kill me – you know the ones – are a YA novel, a pop album, and an alternative jewellery/fashion line. And I want to do them all myself, at home, full-amateur style to a (hopefully) professional standard.

Why should anybody care? Well, my writing has unintentionally gone viral a couple of times now. One example is a piece that was featured as the lead on the No Sleep podcast. So maybe there’s something to watch there.

But more importantly, if I* can do this, then you can too. And then those big creative goals won’t kill you, or at least you won’t take them to your grave. Which. Yay?

I’m also constantly trying to improve my “craft”. Watch me put my failures out there on pretty much every social medium under the same name (or amydoesthings_, because other people won’t let me have any fun), whether you’re working up the courage to start/share something yourself, or you’re interested in horror/comedy, short films, J-fashion, sparkly pop music, home-editing, or managing your hydra-esque bouquet of interests.

EDIT: Oops, I forgot to mention where I was on these goals! Last November (for National Novel Writing Month), I wrote 17k of this novel. The music has been in the works forever, but I’ve finally recorded drafts of four songs, which I now need to master. (shh here’s a vocal sample) And I have designs ready…I just need to make prototypes and then actually start selling them. So watch this space! Or my about page or YT or something. There’ll be updates.

*A mess. Literally a mess. Also terrified of putting myself out there, very introverted, and very shy.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the image we present in social media. There’s a disconnect between what our lives are like and what they seem to be, which can be discouraging when we look at our peers’. For motivation, we get success stories shared in our faces every day, and recommended blog posts about how to perfect our schedule and our eating and our habits.

But it struck me that all of it is positive, and that’s not the truth of success. Sure, good things need to happen for a project to work out, but there are also inevitable ups and downs that we have to go through to reach the end as well. I’d bet anything that for every accomplishment, there’s at least one day where we just want to eat ice cream. People don’t share it when they forget (or choose not) to wash the dishes or take their meds or check their emails, because they don’t think it’s a good thing. They’re wrong. These things are as much a part of our success as anything else.

Save the avocado recipes for when you’re feeling great. When you’re not, it might make you feel better to read about the failures that made up the success. Welcome to I’m A Mess.